David Cassidy: Don’t Look Back
ON APRIL 12TH, 1989, a comeback attempt was the last thing on David Cassidy‘s mind. The former Partridge Family star and reluctant teen idol had been living in a self-imposed musical exile since the late Seventies, devoting his time to film and theater and to a newly discovered passion: breeding thoroughbred racehorses.
But old habits die hard. By the late Eighties, Cassidy had begun writing again in earnest. He had also, thanks to three and a half years of therapy, developed a sense of humor about his pinup past. So, when his thirty-ninth birthday rolled around last year and he happened to hear Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps, the sarcastic morning-drive team on KLOS, in Los Angeles, launch a roast in his honor, Cassidy called the station to get in on the joke. At the invitation of Thompson and Phelps, he drove to KLOS and played three of his new songs on the air. By the show’s end, curious fans had begun gathering in the station’s parking lot, and three record companies had called to offer recording contracts. One of those companies, Enigma, released David Cassidy — his first U.S. album in fourteen years — in October. “It’s the first time people are seeing and hearing all of me,” Cassidy says proudly.
Outwardly, Cassidy has changed little from the twenty-year-old whose boyish, beshagged image was plastered on magazine covers, lunch boxes and bubble-gum cards in the Seventies. Though the last strains of Keith Partridge hysteria subsided nearly sixteen years ago, the man who played the role still has to don a baseball cap and sunglasses if he wants to see a movie in peace. In early October, visiting New York for a week-long publicity blitz, Cassidy registered at the Plaza hotel under the name Bennie Getsoff. He chose the alias for obvious reasons but also, he says, because he wanted to thumb his nose at the stuffiness of the hotel. “Jim Nasium would’ve been much too easy,” he says, laughing. “Don’t you think?”
The last time you talked at length with ROLLING STONE [in 1972], you were obviously wilting under all the pressure and lack of privacy. You must have thought long and hard before deciding to subject yourself to that again.
No, actually, I didn’t. In fact, my fear has always been, well, I’ll come back and people will go, “So what?”
That’s obviously not the case.
No, so I feel good about that. I mean, I’ve really sensed that people have an affection for me. But I didn’t know whether people would think about this as a novelty, or what. And this is not a novelty — this is something that I’ve been doing for close to twenty years. My album may not be your taste, but it’s definitely somebody who has put his ass on the line.
You’ve said you hadn’t intended to attempt a comeback before you appeared on KLOS, but if you were working on songs, there must have been something tugging at you.
Every day, someone would walk up to me in a restaurant or on the street and go, “Why aren’t you making records anymore?” And honestly, I guess I didn’t feel I should have to go begging for a record deal. My pride wouldn’t let me. Nobody likes to be rejected, you know? I had experienced enough of that over the last fifteen years.
Did it surprise you when the record companies did call?
Yeah, it was really a shock. I always felt like if I did come back, I’d be able to sell records. I just wasn’t aware that it was right there. All I had to do was go down and talk into a microphone, and there were a hundred people in the parking lot after I was done.
Did it give you a sense of déjà vu?
No, it gave me a sense of “I did it right.” I retired. I didn’t end up some sad, tragic guy singing in a lounge somewhere. I never went out and took big money for nostalgia and became like an oldies act.
That would have been horrible to behold.
Horrible. But don’t think, as I was making scale in the theater and someone was offering me $100,000 a night to play a date in the Philippines, that it wasn’t tempting. Four years ago, they offered me an enormous amount of money to re-create the role of Keith. It was a lot of money, man, and I didn’t have a job. But I couldn’t do it.
Millions of people would have watched it.
Probably so. Maybe not. There’s a part of me that feels better about it now, because I’ve talked so much about it. In fact, I’d like to do it as a one-shot deal, and do it camp. You know, turn him into a hairdresser or something. It would have to be so sick and twisted that I’m not sure I could keep a straight face and do it. It’s the kind of thing that would be very fertile Saturday Night Live material.
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